To print: Select File and then Print from your browser's menu.
-----------------------------------------------
This story was printed from CdrInfo.com,
located at http://www.cdrinfo.com.
-----------------------------------------------

Appeared on: Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Gainward GTX285

1. About the Gainward GTX285 Graphics card, package

Nvidia has recently announced the GTX285/295 series of graphics cards promising to offer improved gaming experience at a more affordable price tag. Gainward has introduced their own solution based at the generic Nvidia GTX285 model. The Gainward GTX285 has 1GB of DDR3 and it is clocked at 648MHz. Today we will have the chance to compare the new card with other graphics solutions by both Nvidia and AMD/ATI.

The GTX285 marked Nvidia's transition to the 55nm manufacturing process that would further boost speed and decrease the power consumption and therefore, the produced heat. Below is a table showing the main differences among the Nvidia 2xx graphics chips.

GTX 295

GTX 285

GTX 280

GTX 260 Core 216

GTX 260

Stream Processors

2 x 240

240

240

216

192

Texture Address / Filtering

2 x 80 / 80

80 / 80

80 / 80

72/72

64 / 64

ROPs

28

32

32

28

28

Core Clock

576MHz

648MHz

602MHz

576MHz

576MHz

Shader Clock

1242MHz

1476MHz

1296MHz

1242MHz

1242MHz

Memory Clock

999MHz

1242MHz

1107MHz

999MHz

999MHz

Memory Bus Width

2 x 448-bit

512-bit

512-bit

448-bit

448-bit

Frame Buffer

2 x 896MB

1GB

1GB

896MB

896MB

Transistor Count

2 x 1.4B

1.4B

1.4B

1.4B

1.4B

Manufacturing Process

TSMC 55nm

TSMC 55nm

TSMC 65nm

TSMC 65nm

TSMC 65nm

Price

$500

$400

$350 - $400

$250 - $300

$250 - $300

The Gainward GTX285 is based on the generic Nvidia card, with a 648MHz core, 1476MHz shader and 1242MHz memory clocks. Hopefully this product would be ideal for demanding games like Crysis and L4D as we will see later.

- The package

The Gainward GTX285 package has been redesigned as you can see in the picture below. The various logos on the blue-colored box provide basic information about the features on the product.. The card has 1024MB of GDDR3 onboard, it is HDCP-ready for Blu-ray playback and it can be connected to your TV or HD monitor through HDMI via adapter. It's retail price is around ~€362 (including VAT), making it €40-50 cheaper than the ATI 4870X2.

The graphics card is well protected placed into the box into a plastic antistatic packaging. In the box you will also find a printed manual, a driver's disc, a molex-to-pci-e adapter, a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, a DSub-to-DVI-D adapter, a TV-out cable with HDTV support and finally an Internal SPDIF cable, for HDMI audio support. No retail game is bundled here:

The Gainward GTX285 is kept cool using a cooler with a 80mm fan, following Nvidia's stock design.

The available ports include two DVI-D and another one for HDTV.

Make sure to use at least two 6-pin power jacks in order to efficiently power the graphics card. This also means that your PSU should better offer at least 600 Watts of total power.

For all the tests we used the the latest Nvidia drivers (182.06) in order to get the highest possible performance, especially with the latest DX10 game titles.

As you can see below, the GPU core runs
at 648MHz and the memory at 1242MHz. The GPU-Z software provides all the needed information for our eyes:

The same software also reports the temperatures of the various parts of the board. We should also note here that the GTX285 is rather quiet compared to other graphics cards we have tested here at CDRinfo.